This Is Not the Slowest Generation

The Wall Street Journal recently published a pot-stirring article, "The Slowest Generation," which lead readers to believe today's young runners are slower than ever. The assertion is that untimed "fun runs" such as Tough Mudder and the Color Run have killed competitive drive–and perhaps even affected U.S. performance at the elite level.

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Kids these days. Such slackers!

But are they? And, are they all that slow? We decided to dig into the data to see what's going on.

By all measures, we've been riding the wave of a second running boom for nearly two decades, as participation in road races has grown year over year–according to a "State of the Sport" report released by Running USA in July, over the last 20 years only 2003 failed to see more finishers than the previous year. It's that explosive growth, say some defenders of American running, that has contributed to the overall slowing of race times. A key fact Kevin Helliker, author of the WSJ article, cites is another Running USA stat: "Median U.S. marathon finishes for men rose 44 minutes from 1980 through 2011."

The overall decline in the average finishing time is undeniable, but it doesn't prove kids these days "are just not very fast." In fact, over the last decade, we've seen an increasing number of young runners posting fast finishing times. But, to see that, you have to look at what's happening closer to the front of the pack.

For example, at the 2011 NYC Marathon, Scott Knackstedt (2:45:36 gun time) was the 50th fastest U.S. man in the 20-29 age group. A decade earlier, fewer than a dozen Americans in their 20s could muster that time at the same race. In 1998, then-24-year-old Michael Wardian's slightly slower 2:45:44 netted him 8th place among American men in the same age group.

If anything, Generation X – generally those born between 1965 and 1980 – coughed up the slowest times.

Historical data reveals that fewer young front-runners were posting fast times through the 1990s–when late-Generation Xers were coming of age. To illustrate the point, let's look at the average times of the top 25 and top 50 U.S. finishers–those most competitive–in the 20-29 age group at the New York City Marathon. The first running boom is easily identified in the late 1970s and early '80s, but then, curiously, American runners' times slowed–on average, the fastest 50 men in the mid-1990s were running almost a half hour slower than they had a decade earlier (women's times dipped by roughly 20 minutes during the same period). But since then, the trend has reversed and young runners are posting faster times.

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This trend isn't isolated to the marathon, but can be observed at other events and various distances. Let's look at the 25 to 29-year olds who raced the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler in Washington, D.C. If you sketch a smooth line through those individual data points, you'll see it closely mirrors the arc of the NYC Marathon results above–average times of the fastest young runners slowed from the mid-'80s through 2000, then began getting faster. Again, these results are for the 20-somethings at the front of the pack. But what it shows us is that the competitive fire actually flickered out long ago, back when the Millenials were still in diapers, and rekindled sometime around Y2K.

Also absent from the running scene at that time was Tough Mudder and the Color Run. Those events began operations in May 2010 and January 2012, respectively. That's right about the time American's were returning to the podium on the global stage. So, we found it strange that Helliker suggested a connection between the younger set's "performance-related apathy" and America's lack of hardware in the Olympic marathon since 2004. Why look at only the one event as a measure of success, especially considering there have been only 12 medals awarded globally since that time? Expanding our view to other distances, we've seen remarkable results against top-level competition.

Galen Rupp has run blistering times at the longer track distances, setting the American Record at 10,000 meters (26:48.0) in September 2011, when he was only 25 years old. He followed that up with a silver medal at last year's Summer Olympics in London, running 27:30.9, becoming the first U.S. man to medal at the event since Billy Mills captured gold in 1964.

Nick Symmonds blogged on this website about his quest for a medal at this year's Worlds. The 29-year-old captured silver at 800 meters in 1:43.55–the first medal in the event for an American since Rich Kenah's bronze in 1997–and is hungry for more.

Shalane Flanagan captured a bronze medal of her own in the 10,000 meters at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, at the age of 27, setting the American record (30:22.22) in the process.

Ryan Hall placed in the top 4 at the Boston Marathon three times by the time he was 28 years old, the last being a 2:04:58 in 2011. That time is the fastest ever run by an American (though it isn't considered an American record because Boston's point-to-point course is ineligible for such records).

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There's an indication that USA Track & Field, the sport's governing body, expects continued success from America's elites in years to come. It recently revised the Olympic Trials marathon qualifying standards–the minimum marks required to participate in the 2016 selection race. Men now have to run faster than 2:15 (the "A" standard) to get financial assistance to attend the Trials; the 2012 standard was 2:19. (Men who meet the "B" standard of 2:18 are welcomed at their own expense.) The women's standards were tightened, too. A 2:37 is now required, down from 2:39 in 2012. (The women's "B" standard is 2:43.)

"The main thing in revising the standards is to continue to 'raise the bar,'" Jim Estes, director of events for USATF, told Runner's World Newswire when the announcement was made last December. "That seems to have worked if you look at 2012 compared to 2008–the numbers were higher, both overall and as far as the number of 'A' qualifiers."

Many of those qualifiers in 2016 are likely to be kids in their 20s, if another recent trend continues. Traditionally, runners made their way to the marathon later in life, often after years of honing their speed on the track at distances up to 10,000 meters. But we're seeing more young speedsters tackle 26.2 miles earlier in their careers. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Ryan Hall and Dathan Ritzenhein were just 25 years old and both placed in the top 10 overall. At the Trials race to select that team, 70 of the race's 104 finishers were under 30 years of age. That's more than the combined total of under-30 finishers of both the 2000 and 2004 Trials races (69). And there are a growing number of young women competing; 61 of the 152 female runners that completed the 2012 Trials race in Houston were still in their 20s.

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The kids, it seems, are all right. The crop of youngsters crowding the starting line at races around the country may not be the fastest generation ever–that distinction still belongs to the Baby Boomers who fostered the first running boom in the 1970s–but they're demonstrating they're not the slowest either.

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